Sunday, April 22, 2007

Mosul gunmen execute 23 Yazidi in retaliation for stoning death

Left: Two Yazidi women stand at the entrance to a temple. The Yazidi are folowers of a Middle Eastern religion with ancient roots, which says God created the world and gave responsibility for it to archangels. Mosul officials believe the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam after she fell in love with a Muslim and ran away from her family. Relatives dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned to death.

Men in the northern city of Mosul shot and killed 23 people from a minority sect Sunday after pulling them off a bus in an apparent revenge attack, the police said...

In the Mosul killings, armed men in several cars stopped the bus as it was carrying workers from the Mosul Textile Factory to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed population of Christians and Yazidis.

The gunmen checked the identification cars of the passengers, then told Christians to get off the bus, said Mohammed al-Wagga, a senior police official. With the Yazidis still inside, the gunmen drove the bus to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot to death, Wagga said...

A Muslim man who said he had been on the bus but was released with six Christians said 10 gunmen had stopped the bus, then ordered the driver to steer it into a narrow alley, where they ordered the passengers off the bus and separated them according to their identification cards, which indicate the holders' religion.